Spoiled Read online

  “The bad man is back, Mama—look! Il cattivo!”

  Louise hung up her apron tidily, on a hook under the spiral staircase that led up from the kitchen, and came and perched on the arm of the sofa, watching the television distractedly, a fake, merry look on her face. Presently, Elspeth felt her sister’s eyes on her. Louise said touchily, “You know, Spee, you don’t have to come tomorrow. You really don’t. I should have said that before.” Louise folded her arms over her chest and tried very hard to look interested in the cop drama. “You can stay here, obviously—relax—or whatever. I can take Annie with me. I’ll go by myself. It’s fine.”

  “No! No, Mom! Absolutely not,” said Annie, aping Louise’s stern voice. “Do you understand me?”

  “That’s okay,” Elspeth said, relenting. “I’ll come.” She was on the point of adding, “Do you know, I figured it out—I have met that guy,” for she had finally connected a flash of memory with the name. Or rather, not a memory, but a sensation—like a half-recalled pleasant dream that puts one, rather stupidly, in a good mood. She couldn’t picture his face, and in her mind the setting was not Louise and Robert’s terraced house in Clapham but Louise’s first apartment in London, the ground-floor flat off Marylebone Road, where she had lived when she’d moved to London after college, on some vague premise of studying art history. “And I’m never coming back.” And that setting, of course, made no sense. But what Elspeth could recall was a warm, blondish man, of about her height (she always liked that, unlike Louise, who liked to be towered over), who—despite her disdainfulness when they met (she automatically dismissed any admirer of Louise—protecting herself, one might have assumed, but it was really a priggish moral isolationism that prevented her from entering the fray)—could not take his eyes off her. That unexpected occurrence of instant chemistry—for she had immediately felt it as well, though she could barely look at him—and the knowledge that a man (of whom there had historically been a few noteworthy examples) had quite particularly preferred her over Louise had stuck with amazing tenacity in her consciousness. With an embarrassed dip of her head she realized that she had probably thought of Werner Stechel in the abstract within the last few weeks. “What am I going to do here all day?” she said, trying not to grin.

  “It’ll be fun for Annie—he’s got a little girl,” Louise said quickly, as if seconding the motion. She stood up and brushed off her striped cotton housedress, pleased, clearly, that everyone was falling into line. “We’ll all come back here for a swim. I think that’s what he’s been hinting at. It’s insanely hot in Siena now. I’ll get rid of him quickly—don’t worry.”

  Annie took her thumb out of her mouth and addressed the television set. “I don’t like that little girl,” she said.

  THE LITTLE GIRL was called “Julia,” with the soft German J. “Annie!” she screamed as their party appeared, Louise and Elspeth tense and bickering because they were late, having parked at the entrance to the wrong bagno, and then having had to walk to the next one, down the relentlessly shadeless midday streets.

  Annie stopped dead and shrieked, too, rather theatrically, Elspeth thought, and ran to meet her friend.

  “There he is,” Louise said. Her eyes narrowed with bemused indecision. A man had emerged from the restaurant—Elspeth had seen him first: wheat-blond and sunburned, Hawaiian shirt buttoned over swim trunks. Biting off a chunk of roll, he gestured with the rest of it, waving them forward. His eyes seemed to flicker on Elspeth. “Come in! Come in! We are eating inside.” Ve ah eating.

  Elspeth, dragging her heels, suddenly couldn’t face the meeting. Louise turned to her sharply, holding the door. “What’s going on?”

  Inside they stood blinking in the dim, mercifully cooling light, as Werner’s voice boomed through the darkness.

  “The terrace was too full!” He came up behind Louise and put his arms around her. “I couldn’t be bothered.” Startled, she turned her head and he kissed her on the lips.

  Louise gave a hearty, scornful laugh at this. Craning her neck after the girls, who had disappeared, she distractedly introduced Elspeth.

  “So, you live in the States?” said Werner, eyeing her with a puzzled, and yet not inconfident curiosity. “Where, East Coast?”

  With detachment she remembered now, as she took in the flaring nostrils, the appraising eyes that lingered frankly on her breasts, that he had the sort of looks only a teenager could love—one who would see the shaggy shock of bleached blond hair and beachcomber stubble as romantically iconoclastic, not the signs of dissipation they were. She recalled Louise’s lovingly scathing assessment on the beach this morning: that in London he had smoked pot all day and sunbathed nude in his garden while his wife held down the law job and a Filipina came in to clean up the kitchen and iron his shirts. And was now supposedly thinking of starting up an agriturismo at the run-down farmhouse in the Val di Merse he’d bought with God-knows-whose money.

  “New York,” she said, meeting his gaze.

  “Manhattan, yes?” Werner sounded doubtful. His focus shifted minutely, from one of Elspeth’s pupils to the other. He was looking at her, she realized, the way a man looks at a woman whom he can’t be sure he’s slept with, but can’t be sure he hasn’t, either. Unable to keep a straight face, she cracked a grin. “Brooklyn.”

  Louise, who was beckoning Annie and the other girl away from the windows, shot her a “don’t be difficult” look, to which Elspeth responded, “What? It’s where I live.”

  The faintest points of recognition glimmered now, behind the bloodshot blue of the man’s eyes. “Ah, yes, the Brooklyn Bridge.” Elspeth smiled again, embarrassed as she always was in front of Louise when she took up any time or notice. “One of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century.” He gave a victorious chuckle and seized her elbow and Louise’s and steered them awkwardly, three abreast, through a bevy of small tables to a larger one that stood slightly separate from the others, though not in a privileged way, but rather as if the staff used it.

  “I wanted to wait, Louise,” he said, gesturing to the half-eaten bowls of rice on the table. “But Julia wouldn’t let me!”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no—you shouldn’t have waited,” Louise said contemptuously. The sisters sat down on each side of Werner, who took the head. Louise pushed a used plate from before her as the two girls appeared, Julia’s hands on Annie’s shoulders, thrusting her forward through flanks of indulgent diners.

  “We’ll get some more wine—”

  “Stop! Stop!” Annie was afrenzy with giggles.

  A look of impatience crossed Werner’s face. “Sit down, Julia!” He reached out his arm, batting it ineffectually in the direction of the girl, as a harried, indifferent waiter appeared with menus. Louise got Annie settled in the empty chair beside Elspeth. “All right?” she said to Elspeth—meaning, “Will you do the lion’s share?”

  “Fine,” said Elspeth. “Fine.”

  “Julia, stop making that disgusting face! Sit down and eat your pasta!”

  “Pasta, pee-sta! Poo-sta!” Julia said, still standing, and punctuated the comment with a resumption of the silly face.

  “Sitz dich jetzt bin, um Gottes Willen!” Werner lunged for the girl, yanking her into place. Shocked, Elspeth averted her eyes but Louise, as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened, took her seat and said vivaciously to the little girl, “It’s so nice to see you again, Julia—bist du gross geworden!”

  Julia looked very solemn for a moment, then, in a whisper, said to Annie, who was watching, enthralled by all this, “Pasta, pista, poosta.”

  Werner shook his head and wiped his face with his napkin. “Raising kids is hell, eh, Louise?” he said. He swallowed some wine and his eyes strayed cautiously once more to Elspeth. She put a skeptical but not uncharmed expression on her face, like that of an undeceived but indulgent parent. Abruptly, Werner summoned a different waiter—not their own—and demanded two more glasses and another bottle of the vermentino in a serviceable if graceless
Italian.

  “How long is she visiting for?” Louise said. “Julia,” she asked as she turned coaxingly to the girl, “how long are you visiting your father?”

  “Visiting? No, no. She lives with me now. You remember what it’s like, Louise,” Werner said, now addressing his plate with a crust of bread. “She and Sally don’t get along.”

  At the other end of the table Annie took out her Polly and the two girls began to strip her naked.

  It was as if he were talking about a pair of sisters, thought Elspeth. But diagonally across from her sat the six-year-old in question. The girl had her father’s wheat-blond hair, cut rudely—hacked, almost—as if around a bowl. Her clothes, too, were the sort of clothes that looked as if the parents were trying to make a statement: the artsy smock, striped socks, funny pink hat. Around the child’s own mouth was a second, larger mouth, a faded pink clown’s smile, as if she had been playing with markers a day or two ago.

  “Sally is not like you, Louise,” Werner was saying. Louise let this pass, as if it were beneath comment. Werner pushed a plate of bruschetta in Elspeth’s direction, not looking at her. “Have some,” he said under his breath, so that she couldn’t be sure he had addressed her. “She’s not content shuttling the kiddies back and forth to playgroup. She should never have had a child. She came last month and, well—dropped her off!

  “We are stuck with each other now, eh, Julia?” Werner reached across Louise to give the girl a squeeze and was promptly whacked at. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Don’t hit me, please! I am so scared!”

  A young woman, a redhead, quite obviously American, in a peasant skirt and the inevitable unisex sandals, seemed to have some business at their table. An inconvenience, Elspeth read now in her sister’s face: the jejune tourist, newly abroad, who has failed to understand that class divisions remain intact overseas—who had never been made to understand, more likely, that such things existed at all. The young woman was looking with such intensity from Louise to Annie that Elspeth steeled herself for the compliment—although more typically it was a man, seeking to get through to Louise by exclaiming over Annie.

  “Your daughter is beautiful!” the girl gushed. “And she looks just like you!”

  Annie glanced up quickly not at the redhead but at her mother, whose reaction, she had obviously learned, would indicate where on the spectrum of significance the compliment fell. Louise acknowledged the young woman with a nod, lips pressed into a line of forebearance, as the latter continued, “You didn’t tell me she had a daughter, Werner, jeez!” and plopped into the empty chair at the end of the table.

  Elspeth felt the pause that passed between her and Louise. She opened her menu again, bent her head to it, feeling ill. “I’m Melissa,” the girl said. She extended a hand down the table. Louise had to rise to shake it, which she did belatedly—Elspeth couldn’t watch.

  “We met each other a week ago—crossing the Ponte Vecchio, can you imagine?” Werner announced, as if the girl’s physical presence demanded an explanation; whereas, Elspeth sensed, had she failed to return from the bathroom, he would not have felt compelled to mention her. “I’ve offered her a job: She’s going to clean the apartments when I get my agriturismo going. Sleeping with the help is the way to go, don’t you think, Louise?”

  “Yes. I mean—I would think so,” Louise stammered. “That’s right.” The flustered, undecided note, so rare in Louise, made Elspeth cringe; her own assumptions she had kept private, thank God. Anyway, the idea of herself and Werner (in one image, from the night before, swimming together in the ocean and then collapsing into a sand-screw, From Here to Eternity—-style) seemed like a joke. Despite the insult to Louise, it was clear—this struck Elspeth at once—that Werner and she were in fact the true intimates at the table, the old comrades from London, from divorce; the partners in parenthood, in the complicated disappointments of grown-up love. Still, Elspeth’s fantasy had been vivid; she reeled silently, as one does, from the juxtaposition of that vividness with its farfetchedness.

  “Papa!”

  “Julia, you don’t have to shout! I’m right here, for God’s sake.”

  “What about my gelato? Can I have it now, Papa?”

  The half-English, half-German girl’s accent reminded Elspeth of a grade school production of Oliver—Ken oy hev it naow. “Bitte, Papa! Ich witte ein Eis!” Julia looked up beseechingly at Elspeth, as if the latter’s silence had bestowed impartiality on her. From this grotesque coda to her flirtation with Werner, Elspeth looked hurriedly away. She felt trapped by the child’s eyes, with their wildly indiscreet announcement of need.

  “Do you know, Elspeth,” Werner said kindly, misinterpreting her stricken expression, perhaps, “I love to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight. Whenever I am in New York you will find me doing this.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?”

  Louise and Elspeth had spoken at the same time, overeager, and each was more embarrassed than if she had interrupted someone else. Then neither of them could think of anything more to say. Oblivious, or at least pretending to be, Melissa began an overture to Louise. “You just have to come and visit us.” Elspeth could feel Julia’s eyes boring into her but she refused to engage the child. An outraged exasperation with expat life seized her suddenly—its unearned pleasures, its pretensions to assimilation, the children invariably the zenith of this ambition.

  “Oh, good!” Louise fairly cried as the food arrived. She and Elspeth finally dared look at each other. “Ecco la fritto di paranza, Annie!” Melissa went silent at Louise’s perfect Italian. The waiter who, Elspeth fancied, shared her exasperation, unloaded several dishes rapid-fire onto their table. Werner poured more wine. As the adults turned back in on themselves, Julia’s spoon flew through the air and hit the floor.

  “Julia!” cried Annie. Guilty in her admiration, perhaps, she glanced at Louise.

  “It’s okay, Werner, I got it.” It was Melissa who leaned down and retrieved the spoon, holding it out toward Julia with an idiotic expression of hope. The girl, arms crossed over her chest, put her nose in the air and refused to take it.

  “Of course,” said Werner, at last raising his eyes to Elspeth’s again, “I don’t know when I’ll be back in New York now—with this house to fix up …”

  “I hate that fucking house!” Julia spoke up.

  “Eh—it is not so bad, liebchen,” Werner said wearily. “Just look: You have your friend Annie only one hour away.”

  “So?” said Annie, suspicious at the introduction of her name. “So, what?”

  “That will be nice,” Louise said sharply, glaring at Annie. “She and Julia can play together.”

  “Yes, actually,” Werner began, his mouth full of fried fish. He seemed to have regained his spirits suddenly. “I was going to ask you about that.” He swallowed and gulped some wine. “Would you mind if they played together today?”

  Elspeth, silent in her chair, sensed immediately what he meant—was impressed he had the nerve. But Louise (who had remained the more innocent, despite the divorce, of the two) said blithely, “Yes, I was thinking you all might want to come back for a swim.”

  “Wherever you like,” Werner said cheerfully. “It doesn’t matter to me! Melissa and I are going to get some sun, maybe walk around. She’s never seen Castiglione before. I’ll come pick her up around suppertime or a little later. Eh, Annie? Won’t that be fun? A day with your friend?”

  “Suppertime,” Louise repeated. She fixed Werner with a freeze of a smile. “I see.” Elspeth saw Melissa lean down to pick up Julia’s spoon, again cast to the floor. The young woman held it aloft uncertainly for a moment, then tucked it with a shameful grimace under the lip of her plate.

  ON THE CRAMMED service road that wound through the blocks of beach houses, the young women circled around twice, not speaking. Normally Louise would have gotten annoyed at the dearth of parking spots and sworn; today, she remained, through the stop at the grocery store, the gas station,
the purchasing of gelatos for the girls, irreproachably calm. Elspeth glanced at her a couple of times, willing her to crack, but Louise stared ahead, her face a neutral mask. Finally, she created a spot, painstakingly wedging the station wagon between two Fiat Multiplas, a good fifty yards from their gate. The sisters lugged the bags of groceries and bottles of water; the girls ran ahead dripping the last of their gelatos. They all stopped off at the house to trade the groceries for towels, beach toys, sunblock, and magazines and made their way slowly down the path to the beach.

  Elspeth tripped on a root and cried out. “Are you all right?” Julia was at her side immediately. “I’m fine!” Elspeth said, forcing herself to smile. When the girl insisted on taking her hand she was overcome by a kind of peevish dismay. “It just doesn’t seem fair,” she said aloud, glancing at Louise over Julia’s head. “That we get stuck—you know …” Her voice trailed off bitterly when she saw that Louise wasn’t going to respond, wasn’t going to be her partner in complaint. “Whatever could you mean?” her bland expression seemed to say.

  “Stop at the edge, Annie, do you hear me?” Louise warned as she and Elspeth set up camp on the cramped unprivate row of chairs and umbrellas that was the European beach.